Though it has 40 mobile games, 250 employees, and 50 million monthly active players, the publisher is still considered a bit of a small fry among the familiar mobile game industry leaders like King, GungHo Entertainment, and Supercell.

We ran a story earlier this week on Eric Schiermeyer, the co-founder of Zynga and the analytics expert behind its success, and his new game studio called Luminary. But I had a nice walk with Schiermeyer on the coastal cliffs at Half Moon Bay where our conversation drifted across many other subjects.

For the past couple of years, Zynga’s problem was clear. The social gaming giant dominated the charts on Facebook, but not on mobile. And as mobile gaming takes off around the world, Zynga has to break into the top 20 ranks with new hits. If it doesn’t, someone else will claim the bulk of the industry’s profits — as we’ve seen with the ascendent publisher Supercell and its Hay Day social game.

Zynga is shutting down 11 games soon as part of a cost-cutting measure, according to TechCrunch. The free-to-play games are either unpopular or are older titles that stopped monetizing well. Still, some of those, like PetVille (pictured above), had millions of fans once upon a time.